Morphing into Bill Murray (AKA: keeping up with the Millers)

Ever since we packed up our most precious belongings and left our Mexican home of twenty years and moved to be close to the home office in Holland, Michigan, my heart and brain have been crashing and colliding like a perpetual spin cycle of the dryer we never had.

While attempting to embrace such luxuries as the automatic clothes dryer, for example, somehow my heart and brain resist the attempt to remain positive.  Instead they lead me back to an unrealistic memory of “the good ol’ days,” and I romanticize such drudgeries as hanging out the family’s wash on the clothesline.  Oh, for some sunshine in this dreary land of winter “lake effect” grayness.

The hardest part in the mental gymnastics required to stay sane and to be Pollyanna  (looking on the bright side of things) is that I keep thinking about the Millers.  Normal people try to keep up with the Joneses.  Borderline nutcases fixate on the Millers.  Ironically the Millers are a family from Michigan recently moved to Mitla, Oaxaca.  They are new to the mission field as we are new to living in Michigan.

What messes with my mind is this mental image that keeps replaying itself on loop.  The Millers are living my life, renting my house, driving to my children’s school, teaching classes where I used to occasionally teach, sleeping in my beds, feeding my dogs, eating out with my friends, and very specifically, they are eating fresh tamales (from my tamale lady who still comes to my house every Saturday) off of my plates at my kitchen table in my house in my little town of Mitla….

You can see why my heart and brain are on the verge of exploding over the weirdness of it all.  Then I wonder if the Millers even like all the strange things we miss so badly, and I wonder if perhaps they might even miss all the odd things about living in Michigan that we just don’t get.  While the Millers are perhaps burning foods automatically set at 350 degrees, not thinking to adjust the recipe to Celsius, we are facing raw cookies because my daughter forgets to adjust the recipe back up from 175 degrees to Fahrenheit.

Likely the Millers are frantically hunting all over Oaxaca City for ingredients not found south of the border, while I am searching high and low for the items I used to use to substitute for the American products not available in Mexico that I now actually prefer.  Case in point, we could never find Swiss Miss hot chocolate mixes, so we adapted and started using “Abuelita” Mexican hot chocolate mix.  Now I am haunting every Mexican market in Holland, Michigan trying to find the best price for granny’s good cinnamon flavored chocolate.  Is this insanity?

What traps my brain in a continual bottomless vortex is the agonizingly frightful possibility that there is no turning back.  Instead I am stuck in this alternate existence, morphing into a combination of several Bill Murray movie roles.  It’s like a Groundhog Day nightmare that doesn’t end.  Meanwhile I’m also like the main character of “What About Bob?” taking one baby step at a time away from neuroses and fears to eventual sanity, and at the same time I am like the oblivious character in “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” clueless about the bigger part I am playing in a drama not of my choosing.

I wonder how the rest of this story will play out once I adjust?

*Photo of the tamale girl was taken from Deb Miller's Facebook page with permission, and the vortex photo I borrowed from this website. If you are interested in seeing or reading more about the Millers, check out their blog here.